Noam Chomsky on labor

You’d be hard-pressed to name a public intellectual as incisive as Chomsky.  Here’s a new interview where he discusses the future of labor in the US.

Some sample quotes, this one on power:

First of all, don’t believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they’re doing this, that, or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often is.

On right-wing radio:

If you look at those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it’s kind of interesting. If you can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I’ve never seen a study, but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people think, “I’ve done everything right all my life, I’m a god-fearing Christian, I’m white, I’m male, I’ve worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I’m supposed to do. And I’m getting shafted.” And in fact they are getting shafted

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23178

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Demand More. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.